Is Nuclear Power Worth the Risk?

[AngryData]

Nuclear power is the only surefire way to provide for all of our current and future energy needs, especially if you factor in carbon sequestering. On top of all that, per megawatt produced it is the safest form of energy production. Yeah there have been accidents, but they were all preventable if people weren't purposefully kept ignorant of nuclear power and politicians weren't afraid to properly fund and manage it. Fukushima design was made using 50s nuclear technology that's like 15 years past it's first invention. It should have been either decommissioned or rebuilt to modern designs, but of course no one was willing to fund or support such a thing. It's like driving around in a Model-T then being surprised that it doesn't have airbags and seat belts when something goes wrong.

[redis_mlc]

> there have been accidents, but they were all preventable if people

You can always spot the nuclear apologist because they gloss over the intractable people issues with managing reactors for literally decades without a single lapse.

I think nuclear history has amply shown that people cannot be trusted to manage reactors.

The horrible reality we're now facing is that once you build a reactor, political forces force re-certification decades beyond their original design - regardless of the interior condition of the reactor.

At the moment of reckoning when a reactor must finally be shutdown, you can bet a swift bankruptcy followed by skyrocketing local electricity rates.

[heisenbit]

The waste storage problem is not solved.

And looking at how much the clean up of large scale nuclear processing has and will cost it is not cheap either.

Now that wind and solar are getting to the same price point there is no point in using nuclear reactors for energy generation.

[8bitsrule]

Nuclear was always high risk; Fukushima begged for disaster. Human errors dogged it from the beginning. The region had experienced multiple large tsumani in the century before it was built. Hello? The site started out as a 33-meter bluff, which was lowered to 7-meters. TEPCO was warned about their emergency generators and did nothing. Pretty damn sure these were not engineering decisions.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> per megawatt produced it (Nuclear power) is the safest form of energy production.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/25/chernoby...

Thousands dead, probably more, "up to 1 million under a worst-case scenario study". 5 million people still living on contaminated land, and it's not over.

[de_watcher]

The window of opportunity to redesign reliably has closed. We have too much software now.

[CameronNemo]

Would be great to see a fossil fuels article with the same perspective. Too many people fail to apply the same standards to the status quo as they do to alternatives.

[LatteLazy]

Risk isn't a single unified, fungible, quantifiable thing. We can't properly consider it or make decisions including it without understanding that.

A one in a million change of killing one million people is fundamentally different to a 100% chance of killing one person, even though the average outcome is the same.

You also can't get an honest assessment of risk without asking people to put their money where their mouth is: everyone considers themselves above average drivers, yet insurance companies won't touch some people (often those most convinced they're the lowest risk).

There are major economic and political concerns around any large project too, those add risks not present in the technology itself, and they don't just add new, clean, quantifiable risks, they also multiple (or reduce) existing risks in ways no one can predict or understand.

Before we can try to talk seriously about nuclear (or any other large project with a complex risk profile), we need a better understanding of risk itself. Any article that doesn't start at that point is (at best) uninformed chatter or (at worst) clickbait designed to start arguments.

[Iv]

Here is what a clean and safe energy source looks like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_...

Here is what nuclear energy wants to replace: https://endcoal.org/health/

[nickik]

The failure of our society to turn into a nuclear based society will be looked laughed at in the future.

People in a 100 years will say 'they had invented everything they needed in the 1950-60 but failed to do anything'.

Its embarrassing for the human project and in time everybody will realize this.

Many a doctoral thesis will be written about how a whole society can be so dumb an short sighted.

[esotericn]

Is the risk of nuclear higher than that of fossil fuel usage?

Climate change is a thing, right now, and we're exacerbating its' effects on an ongoing basis.

Is living worth the risk of dying?

[ryanmercer]

Is radioactive coal ash (and other pollutants), from currently operating coal plants, falling from the skies worth it?

[wruza]

What is the answer to this risk?

(Cough coal cough.)

[rad_gruchalski]

As proven by Hambach Forest in Germany already.

[Jamwinner]

This fear mongering puts us back decades.

[lm28469]

I see it that way: state of the art fossil fuel based energy production is harmful, no matter what. State of the art nuclear based energy production is extremely safe [0]. In a perfect world we'd use 100% clean renewable energy, but we're not living in a perfect world and nuclear is the 2nd best option.

We're literally the proverbial frog being slowly boiled alive.

[0] just don't run shady tests under dubious communistic governments and don't build it next to an ocean over an active seismic zone.

[kumarvvr]

At this point, there is no long teem alternative to baseload power apart from Nuclear.

Inless battery technology allows us to use renewable power as a baseload plant.